One legacy of childhood sexual abuse is the adult survivor's deep alienation from his/her own fantasy life; this is accompanied by a profound mistrust of the imaginings of others, including the therapist's. It is often erotic and aggressive fantasies in particular that are problematic for such patients. These patients usually believe for a protracted period of time that it was their fantasies and desires that evoked the sexual abuse in the first place. To engage in conscious erotic or aggressive fantasies thus is experienced as very dangerous. Further, the adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse almost always has an identification with her abuser that is split off and repugnant. Erotic or aggressive fantasies threaten evocation to consciousness of that self-representation, and thus are shunned, relegated to the realm of the unconscious. So fraught with danger is the domain of conscious fantasy for these patients that they view this aspect of mental life with deep suspicion and fear. It is within the relational matrix of the therapeutic field that clinician and patient work with projective and introjective processes and identifications to free from constraint the patient's ability to fantasize independently and to play with fantasies between them. In a successful projective identification, the patient projects from her inner world a disowned and/or dissociated sense of herself or of an internalized object. The therapist temporarily identifies with the patient's projection, experiencing herself like the projected part of the patient's self or object world. When things go well, the therapist eventually cognitively processes what initially feels like an alien experience and is able to help the patient "take back" the projected aspect of her interior world. Case studies are presented to illustrate the concepts discussed. 4 references